It's A Luxurious Ride, Especially Compared With The Mechanical Has-Beens It Will Eventually Replace

NEW HAVEN — — A gremlin haunted the new M-8 train out of Union Station Thursday morning, and its name was "Dave."

But beyond that glitch and a few other minor complaints, the air-suspended ride from New Haven to Stamford in the clean, bright car was a pleasure, especially compared with the trip back in one of Metro-North's jostling old battle wagons.

The Japanese-made M-8s debuted in an eight-car train on the New Haven to New York City line last week. The Metro-North Commuter Railroad has 26 of the cars, enough to roll out two more trains, one this week and another in April, agency spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said. More new cars are to be added steadily.

The track stars appear at the end of a severe winter of discontent among Connecticut commuters, who have endured breakdowns, delays, unheated trains and generally lousy service. Although more people will have the chance to ride in an M-8, there has been no announced schedule for the new trains. So commuters have been pleasantly surprised, or resigned to their fate, depending on which train pulled up to the platform.

I knew the 6:24 a.m. departure Thursday on the through trip to New York City was an M-8, and another guy — who had asked a conductor when and where he could catch the new train — knew, too. But most of the passengers huddled with their coffee cups in the biting cold were oblivious until the gleaming red roller slid up to the New Haven platform.

"How do you like the new train?" I asked the ticket man as he worked his puncher. He grinned and said passengers on the upgraded trains have turned out to be a higher grade of human.

"You people are all better people," he said. "You people are all nice."

As we passed a salt marsh, the young man seated across from me, tapping on his iPad, looked up and said, "You can actually see out the windows. Before, it was all blurry."

The windows are a third larger than those in the older cars, Anders said, and there are no center mullions, so they're like picture windows. A blond, middle-aged lady sitting next to me commented on the overall brightness of the car, compared with the grungy, faux-wood-panel interior and blotchy windows in the old cars.

Faults, however, were found in the new cars.

A lady sitting next to the young man, a huge handbag on her lap, agreed about the brightness and visibility, but said the leg room seemed tighter. She and a man wearing light blue pants with black stripes down the sides talked about the new seating arrangement and grieved for the loss of the aisle seat on the old cars that had no seat opposite, a boon to any weary traveler in need of a good leg stretching.

Actually, Anders said, "knee space" on facing seats is the same as on older models and there's an additional inch of knee room on all other seats because of an indent in the seat backs.

The M-8's body is 2 inches wider than the older cars, but the M-8s have fewer total seats for several reasons, Anders said. New handicapped-accessible toilets take up nine seats' worth of space, compared with the tiny [about two seats' worth] johns in the old cars. Also, electrical components that hang under the older-model cars are housed inside the M-8's body for protection from weather, which prevents breakdowns.

That also takes up space, so to compensate, one more seat was added to one side of the aisle, making six [three-facing-three] instead of five seats on that side and the four [two-facing-two] on the other. The M-8s run in "married pairs," according to a Metro-North press release — one car with 110 seats; the other, the one equipped with a toilet, has 101 seats.

The chatty lady with the big handbag was smiling and talking with other passengers, in no obvious distress, but complaining anyway. She was pointing out the car's malfunctioning LED station-announcement sign — "Broken already," she sighed — when a soothing voice came over the public address system.

"My name is Dave," the voice said, "and my mother tongue is American."

Passengers' responses ranged from confusion to laughter, but my thoughts went immediately to the corrupt computer, Hal, in the film, "2001: A Space Odyssey."

What, I wondered, will it demand? Perhaps, "I'm afraid I can't let you leave the train, Jesse."

But Anders said this was likely a test of the announcement system, although she couldn't explain Dave's specific comments.

"Dave's not working so well," the handbag lady said, and another lady across from her wearing a charcoal fur coat and reading a James Patterson novel laughed.

The blond, middle-aged woman next to me said she dreaded going into work because she knew her in-box was full and she intensely disliked her boss. She likened the new train to "something you'd see in Paris, not in the Connecticut-New York area," and said she wished she could just ride back and forth all day instead of having to face her 10-hour work day.

Getting off in Stamford, I said to the fur coat lady, "It's kind of depressing that I have to ride the crappy train back to New Haven."

But she had heard the news that more M-8s would be rolling out soon, increasing everyone's chances for an improved commute.